Proof

By the first theorem of this section, the subfield generated by the empty set is isomorphic to Z/pZ for some prime p. By the previous theorem, F inherits the structure of a vector space over Z/pZ. If the dimension of this vector space is n, then every element of F can be uniquely represented as a Z/pZ linear combination of n given basis vectors, and so the number of elements of F is pn.